The following meanings for the abbreviations used in this specification apply:    GPRS General Packet Radio Service.    GTP GPRS Tunnelling Protocol    IANA Internet Assigned Numbers Authority    IETF Internet Engineering Task Force    IPv6 Internet Protocol version 6    LMA Local Mobility Anchor    MAC Media access control    MAG Mobile Access Gateway    MN Mobile Node    PMIP6 Proxy Mobile IPv6    RA Router Advertisement
Embodiments of the present invention relate to IPv6 addressing in the case of network based mobility framework, when local IPv6 address prefixes are used, and for numbering of very resource constrained nodes, such as battery, memory, and processing power constrained.
A resource constrained node is a device that has less CPU power, battery power, ROM or RAM memory, or resources alike, than what is considered to be common for Internet connected devices. For resource constrained nodes saving of all resources is of extreme importance.
The idea of using local IPv6 prefixes, for offloading and local access when network based mobility is used, is topical.
What comes to resource constrained nodes; the currently available addressing methods are essentially automated address configuration tools, such as Stateless Address Autoconfiguration and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol version 6. These both are quite complex for resource constrained nodes. Manual IPv6 address configuration is theoretically possibly, but usually not in practice even with PCs, let alone with these resource constrained nodes.
A similar problem may occur when a mobile node (MN) using PMIP6 and having a local address in an old network moves to a new network, wherein in the new network, a new address would be necessary, wherein at least during the address re-configuration, connection loss may occur.
Thus, at present there is no satisfying way of handling addresses in particular of resource constrained nodes (such as machine type communication (MTC) nodes, for example).